STUG n., adj., v.

Scots is full of evocative words describing particular kinds of people. A stammerel, for instance, is a clumsy or stupid person; a stodgel is a slow, rather foolish person; a stoit is an ungainly person not blessed with many brains, and a stram is a big, blundering man. Given that list of forms, you can perhaps guess the meaning of today’s word!

According to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), however, the meaning of stug as

“a stocky coarse-built person … whose movements are stiff and awkward”

seems to be a comparatively late development, first recorded in Aberdeen in 1880. In the seventeenth century, the word seems to be a variant of stok or stog, meaning a thrust or a stab, and this older meaning persisted. It’s still used, apparently, to refer to dressing stone roughly with a pointed chisel. DSL even records a specialised meaning in the sport of curling, i.e.:

“a chance shot which reaches its mark”.

And many citations refer to cutting or shearing or clipping clumsily, especially in harvesting or in the care of horses. The Edinburgh Gazette of 1699 advertises

“A brown stou’d Horse, stug Tail’d”

(that is, with a docked tail). A cow with short, stumpy horns can be referred to as

“stug-horned”.

The association of words beginning with “st” with clumsiness as well as suddenness – as these definitions suggest – seems to be an example of what linguists call phonaesthesia: the association of particular sound-clusters with particular semantic components. Another example consists of “gl” words, such as glance, glass, gleam, glitter, glow, which all relate in some way to light.

This Scots Word of the Week was written by Jeremy Smith. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.